Obama to Ohio: Trust me

11/3/12 1:10 PM EDT

MENTOR, Ohio – President Obama made the case for his all-together-now vision of the federal government helping those in need, and he urged Ohioans to trust him to watch out for their best interests.

Mocking Romney’s idea of change, Obama reiterated the trust-me-I’ll-fight-for-you theme that has been the centerpiece of his campaign’s closing argument.

“When you elect a president you don’t know what kind of emergencies may happen, you don’t know what problems he or she may deal with,” Obama said. “But you do want to be able to trust your president. You want to know that your president means what he says and sayswhat he means. After four years as president, you know me. You may not agree with every decision I’ve made at times have been frustrated by the pace of change. But you know what I believe. You know where I stand. You know I tell the truth. And you know I’ll fight for you and your families every single day.”

As he has since re-joining the campaign trail after a hiatus to monitor the federal response to Hurricane Sandy, Obama drew on the lessons of the storm though he warned – as complaints grow louder about food, water, gas and electricity shortages – that a full recovery will not come soon.

“We mourn those who are lost but we will walk with the people whose lives have been upended by the storm every step of the way this long, hard road to recovery,” he said. “I hope everybody, I hope everybody understands this will be not just a couple weeks, this will be months of recovery for a lot of these families.”

And Obama allowed that the federal government can do good for people so long as it recognizes proper limits, tying the message in to his vow to protect women’s health care choices.

“America is stronger when there are rules, some rules in place to protect our kids from toxic dumping, to protect seniors from being taken advantage of by unscrupulous credit card companies or mortgage lenders,” he said. “We think that Washington has a role to play in making sure that were creating great infrastructure, roads and bridges in our country so that we can move products and services everywhere. And then we also believethere are some things Washington doesn’t to do. For example, Washington doesn’t need to control the health care choices that women are capable of making for themselves.”

But this stop, Obama’s last in a four-event, 26-hour swing through Ohio’s largely white working class and suburban communities, drew a homogenous crowd of 4,000 to a high school gymnasium with banners touting lacrosse, ice hockey and tennis championships.

The riser behind him held more men than women, a nod to what’s left of Ohio’s undecided voters. For weeks the view for the cameras was a milieu of women, at some events the in-shot crowd was entirely female.

Lake County, a 95 percent white Cleveland suburb home to both white-collar commuters and blue-collar factory workers, is hardly prime Democratic turf, but it was one of six in Ohio that flipped from George W. Bush in 2004 to Obama in 2008.

In case the outreach was evident, Obama campaign organizer Kirsten Jacobson made it clear while warming up the crowd here, telling a story of her uncle, a “white guy for Obama” who, she said, is fighting to preserve women’s health care rights.

Obama will head from here to Milwaukee and Dubuque, Iowa, before finishing his day in Reston, Va.